Office Hours
by litvirg
Summary: Bellamy is a new History professor at Ark University. And it was all going fine until one pesky art student, Clarke Griffin finds her way into his class.
1. Chapter 1

Bellamy liked teaching. He liked standing in the front of a room, speaking out about something he knew he was an expert on. He liked sparking the interest of his students. He liked showing them that history wasn't what they were taught, that it wasn't what was in the movies, that it was so much more. He liked bringing a bit of the past to them.

He liked it when his students argued with him. He liked it when he could tell that they thought he was full of crap, when they argued with him because he liked the fire in them. He wanted to light it, to tend it, to blow on it and make it bigger and bigger.

"_You're such a nerd_," his sister told him, when he tried explaining his first day. He'd been nervous—terrified actually. He'd never been in the front of a room, never been in command of a situation the way he was when he stood at the front of a classroom. He'd always been in the back, quietly paying his dues, working his way up. It was new and exciting, and nerve wracking and he loved it.

_"I bet you put your students to sleep," Octavia teased. _

_"Hey," he protested. "Ancient Religions are fascinating, especially the way I teach them."_

_"Oh and how's that?" she asked. _

_"I'm very…" he wasn't sure what to say. Excited. Loud. Dorky. "Compelling."_

_He heard her laugh on the other end of the phone. "Uh huh. Sure, Bell. Let me guess, the front two rows of desks are all girls right?"_

_Bellamy rolled his eyes. "I don't like what you're insinuating, O" he said. "My students are there for purely academic reasons."_

_"Mhmm," Octavia had hummed, unconvinced. "Sure they, are big brother."_

He'd made it habit to call Octavia after his last class every night. She teased him about it mercilessly_—"why don't you make a few teacher friends, and go out for a drink with them? Then you can bore them with tales of your lectures instead of me?"_—and he'd admit that she probably had a point. But every night, he'd pack up his bag, sling it over his shoulder, and make his way back to his tiny little apartment, grab a beer and a red pen, and call his sister.

She didn't always answer—Octavia's social life was actually existent, unlike his, so he'd usually leave a quick message about his day, and then pull some papers out for grading. It was a good system. It worked for him. Besides, it's not like he could afford to go out drinking with his colleagues every night anyway.

It might've been a bit lonely, but he had O, and his roommate Miller seemed like a decent guy, and they got along, so all in all it wasn't too bad.

He wasn't lying when he told Octavia that his students were great. They were the kind of kids he wished he'd had in his own classes when he was a student a few years earlier. They talked. They actually took notes. They had things to say.

Well. Most of them.

There was one girl, who hadn't said more than her name and her major (_Clarke Griffin. Fine Arts_) since the first class two and a half weeks ago. He couldn't understand why she'd even take the course if she didn't want to get anything out of it. It was a waste—a waste of her money, a waste of her time. A waste of _his_ time—he wasn't going to spend an hour a day with students who didn't care. He'd look up at her hopefully every time he'd open the floor up for discussion, but she usually wasn't even paying attention, her nose was stuck in some other book. He tried not to prickle at the thought.

He was finishing up with his lecture when he glanced up at her.

She had her pen stuck between her teeth again. She was flipping through her notes, quickly, barely glancing at the words on the page. Her eyebrows were scrunched together and her foot was tapping wildly on the floor.

He felt himself trail off midsentence as he watched the pen bounce up and down and up and down between her lips. It tilted off to the side and be watched her tongue flick out to push it back before it slipped from her mouth completely, and he felt his own mouth run dry.

"Professor?" A young guy in the front row pulled him back to reality.

"Uh," he shook his head, clearing his thoughts—shaking her out of his thoughts. "Sorry. Lost my train of thought."

The girl had dropped her pen into her hand and was circling notes from the page she'd finally flipped to. She hadn't even glanced up. Every other day, she'd come to class, sit herself in the back row, and fix her eyes on her notebook, never even bothering to look up as he lectured. Sighing, he tore his gaze from her again and looked back toward the front row where another student was speaking.

"You were about to hand out the prompts for our first paper," she said.

He nodded his head, snapping his fingers before he turned to grab the stacks of papers from the desk behind him.

"Yes!" he said, smiling down at the girl who had redirected his thoughts. _Back to where they should be_, he reminded himself. "The dreaded moment has arrived."

He flipped through the papers, dividing them into two stacks, handing one pile to a student on each end of the row, to pass back.

"We've been focusing on origin stories for the past few weeks, as you all know. So for this first paper, it'll be your job to choose two—just two—out of the ones we've looked at so far, and write a comparative paper on them"

He glanced up at her. She had taken the essay prompt, scribbled a quick note on it, and had gone back to flipping through her other notes. He wished it didn't bother him that she hadn't looked up once—he'd been a student not too long ago, he knew plenty of people didn't pay attention in class—but it sent an unpleasant tickle crawling under the skin of his neck. Not once, in the whole lecture had she bothered to lift her head from her notebook.

It just _bothered_ him.

Huffing a bit indignantly to himself, he carried on. "See?" he said a bit louder, waving a leftover prompt sheet in front of him. "Only three to five pages. Nothing terrible." He checked his watch and saw that there were only about five minutes left in his allotted class time, and decided he didn't feel like cramming in any extra material in the final few minutes.

"I think we'll end it there for the day. Feel free to come up after class, or email me about your paper ideas."

A collective sigh of relief filled the classroom, soon replaced by the shuffling of papers and notebooks and backpacks. He went back to his own desk to gather up his papers and notes before his next class, ready for the final hour of his day to be over so he could go home, grab a beer and give his sister a call.

He looked up when the noise died down to see that all—well almost all—of the students had cleared out of the room. The only one left was the blonde girl in the back of the class.

He pulled his bag over his shoulder and wove his way through the desks, stopping at hers before seeing himself out. He tapped a finger on her desk a few times, startling her.

"I think Professor Kane has this classroom next," he said pulling her out of whatever she'd been reading.

"Oh," she said, scrambling to gather her materials, and shoved them in her bag. "Right, sorry. Must have zoned out for a moment."

He couldn't help but scoff.

"Something funny," she raised an eyebrow at him. Then she seemed to remember exactly who she was speaking to. "Professor?"

Bellamy leaned back against the desk across from her, crossing his ankles in front of him. "Miss Griffin," he said, noting the way she scrunched her nose up at the formality. "I'm not sure if you're aware, seeing how little attention you pay in my class, but participation is twenty percent of your grade. It would probably be in your best interest to add a thought or two to the class discussion now and again."

She looked as if she was about to argue with him, her eyebrows pulled tight together, and her jaw dipping open. But she snapped her mouth closed and settled with a nod.

He pushed himself off the desk and walked over to the door.

"See you Wednesday, Miss Griffin," he called over his shoulder. "I look forward to hearing what you have to say."

Her hand was up in the air before he even finished his question. Rolling his head to the side, he let out a huff of breath, hoping it would hide the smile he could feel itching to spread wide across his face. She caught his eye and waggled her fingers in the air.

"Miss Griffin, don't you think you should let someone else have a turn?" he sighed.

She shrugged, smiling. "Just trying to make up for lost time, Professor," she said cheerily, but lowed her hand. He watched her for a moment longer, catching how she slipped her pen between her teeth to stop a laugh from tumbling out.

The worst part was that he wanted to call on her. He wanted to hear what she had to say. She'd been brilliant so far—he hardly believed she was an art major. If her work so far in his class was anything to go by, she was a natural born history student.

Her eyes lit up every time she had something to say—and she'd had plenty to say in the past week. She had an answer to every question, a comment at the end of every lecture. Any time there was a lull in class, there was her hand, fingers waggling at him from above her head.

He tried to ignore it. The way her eyes widened in excitement every time he nodded in her direction, every time he asked her to speak up, to say what was on her mind. Every time he nodded back, pointing at her, nodding, biting his lip and trying to think of something brilliant to say back to her.

The way her voice was low and gravely, but loud and excited at the same time. It washed over him as she went on and on, ignoring the eye rolling of her classmates, ignoring the way the stuck up kid in the front row glared at him every time he'd point to her instead of him. It rang in his head after class, louder and louder with each day that passed.

He tried, he wanted to push it out of his head. It was ridiculous, it was stupid. She was just his student, he was her teacher. That's all. Her smile wasn't at him and it wasn't about him, it was just a smile, that's all it was.

"Professor?"

He was startled out of his thoughts. He looked up from his desk, to see an empty classroom. Empty except for a pair of paint stained jeans and a baggy sweater standing in front of him. He looked up.

"Miss Griffin, sorry, must have dazed off for a moment," he shook his head. "How can I help you?"

She glanced down at her feet, and he could have sworn he saw the faintest hint of a blush creeping up her neck.

"Uh, just wanted to let you know that I, uh," she started, looking back up at him. She opened and shut her mouth once. "I just really enjoyed you lecture today. Uh. Professor."

"Oh," he said. "Thanks, Mi—"

"Clarke," she interrupted. "The whole 'Miss Griffin' thing always seemed kind of weird." She waited for him to say something but he just smiled up at her and nodded. "Okay, then," she continued. "See you on Monday then, Professor."

She shouldered her bag, and stepped backward a few steps, watching him, before she turned and walked out of the door.

"See you Monday," he muttered to himself. He slapped his notebook closed, and shoved it into his bag. The papers sitting in his folder, needing to be graded, could wait until after a drink.


	2. Chapter 2

Her phone had been sitting opposite her on the table, buzzing every few minutes since she had gotten to the cafe, but she ignored it. She let it bleed into the noise of the café. The soft chatter and the yelling of orders across the counter and the grinding of the machines and the pinging of the oven and the scratching of her pencil across the page. It all swirled together, a low humming refrain sinking in the air around her.

She pushed it all to the side and focused on the movement of the color across her page. The soft swipe of the red pencil staining the page up and down and up and down.

She knocked her elbow into the stack of binders sitting next to her sketch pad and shoved the pile aside. She should be working on homework. She should have worked on homework the day before too, but she'd found the café just off campus and it was just busy enough for her to drown everything out and work on her sketching without feeling like the air around her was too empty. She thought too much without a little chaos.

But she had a paper to write.

She looked over at her notebook sitting next to her sketchbook. She did have notes in the class. She knew Professor Blake thought she slacked off the first two weeks but she was paying attention. She just had a lot on her plate. She was good at multitasking.

And procrastinating.

She flipped through a few pages of her notes before she plopped them back down onto the pile, deciding to work on the paper later. There was no point forcing anything if she didn't have any ideas. Instead she pulled her sketchbook back in front of her and flipped to a new page.

She ignored her stomach crumbling and her hand cramping. She didn't notice the people flooding into the café, didn't hear the crack of thunder overhead. She was lost in the page, the colors swirling around her. She couldn't explain it. She tried, mostly with her mom when they were arguing about her course load—but it was like she could feel the colors. She felt them itch and scratch and pull her down to where they needed to be, and it was all that made sense. It pulled her in and she couldn't see or hear or feel anything else.

So she didn't hear her name called to her across the café, or the footsteps come up beside her. She jumped when a hand tapped her on the shoulder, and she grabbed at her chest, shrieking.

"Sorry," the voice said. "Didn't mean to startle you."

She looked up and a pair of big brown eyes were smiling down at her from beneath a mop of wet hair.

"I know it's weird since I'm you're teacher and everything," Professor Blake continued. "But do you mind if I use one of your open chairs? Seems I wasn't the only one with the idea to take cover from the storm in here."

"Storm?" she asked, and turned to look out the window. Sure enough, the sky had turned a deep ashen color, and it was pouring down rain. His sodden clothes suddenly made sense. He must have tried to tough it out for a bit though, because his shirt was completely soaked through. It was a thick gray t-shirt, and it was clinging to his chest. It wasn't at all how she expected to see one of her Professors. It was much too casual. It was too…cute.

"Clarke?"

She looked back up at him, realizing that he was waiting for an answer. "Oh, right, yeah," she said nodding. She started moving her piles over onto the half of the table closest to her instead of leaving them strewn all around. "Go ahead."

"Thanks," he smiled. "I promise I'll be quiet."

Professor Blake was not quiet.

First it was tapping. His foot. His fingers. His pen. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. She tried to ignore it—it shouldn't have been hard to ignore it. It should have been easy to blend it all in with all the other noise in the café. To blur it all together until the tapping faded in with the grinding coffee and the soft music playing over the scratchy speakers and the hushed conversations from the corner booth.

But she'd let her eyes trail up from where they had been focusing on her paper, where they'd been boring into her sketchbook in an attempt to make herself focus, and she saw his fingers tap absentmindedly against the spine of his book or the mug he was sipping from. His fingers were long and tan and tap tap tapping and she flipped to another page and before she could even register what she was doing, she had started to sketch a pair of lean, tan hands wrapped around a word copy of the Iliad.

She nearly choked on her own tea when she realized what exactly she'd started to draw. Her face flushed with heat and she had to peek over the edge of the sketchbook that she had since clutched close to her chest to make sure he hadn't noticed. He seemed perfectly wrapped up in his book, so she quickly flipped to another page and started from scratch.

_It's just hands_, she tried to tell herself, pushing it out of her mind. _Yeah_, she though. _Your professor's hands_.

She shook her head. She just needed something else to draw.

The tapping wasn't the end of it.

After the tapping, came the humming. It was soft, and sporadic. He'd hum a bit of one song as he was flipping through the pages of his book, then another as he took a sip of his coffee. A few minutes later she'd hear a bar or two of yet another.

He didn't even seem to notice. He was sitting still, his foot still tapping softly against the ground, the worn pages of the book still cradled in his hand, his eyes just running over the page as he broke their silence every minute or so with another song so soft she couldn't tell what it was.

Eventually she had to snap her sketchbook shut.

His head tilted up to look at her at that. He glanced down at her now shut sketchbook and then back up at her where she was sitting leaned back, mug in hand, sipping at her tea.

"Leaving?" he asked, nodding at the stack of closed notebooks.

She shook her head. "No just…taking a break. It's hard to focus with everything going on in here," she lied.

He glanced around the café. Apparently she'd been too preoccupied by the tapping and the humming and the soft swish of the pages as they flipped to notice that the café had nearly cleared out in the time they'd been sitting there. There was one other customer, on the far side of the room, tucked into a little corner booth typing at his laptop.

Professor Blake looked back at her with one eyebrow raised. "Yes, quite the mad house."

She huffed out a breath, annoyed at him for making fun of her when it was clearly his fault she couldn't focus anyway. If he'd just been _quiet_ like he said he would…

He smirked at her. "Sorry," he said, not sounding sorry at all. "Was I distracting you?" he flipped his book shut, his pointer finger still wedged between the pages as the rest of them started tapping out a quiet beat on the back cover.

"No," she replied, indignant. "I'm just not used to having someone sit with me while I sketch."

"Ah," he said, still smirking. He pointed to her sketchbook with his free hand. "Could I see what you drew?"

Clarke nearly choked on her tea. She definitely wasn't expecting that. People asked her all the time, but that was usually when she was curled over the page, scribbling and they could pop over her shoulder and look before she could give a response.

She certainly didn't expect her _history professor_ to ask to see her drawings.

"Um," she said pulling the sketchbook closer to her so she could flip through and find some drawing to show him. One that _wasn't_ the one of his hands. "Sure, I guess."

She flipped through a couple pages, trying to find one she wouldn't be too embarrassed about. It was always weird showing new people her stuff. They didn't really get it a lot of the time. She skipped over all the ones that were half finished portraits or silly ones she'd started for her friends, she pushed right past the one of his hands, not even looking at it before she was at the next page.

Eventually she went to one in the middle of the book. She'd started it a few days ago, and it was just about finished, so it would be less embarrassing than showing him the half-finished sketch of her roommate Raven. She was actually pretty proud of it, if she was going to be honest with herself. She grinned down at before she passed her sketchbook over to him.

He took it gingerly, setting his mug down to hold it with both hands. It was actually kind of adorable the way he held it with such care. As if it was a delicate sculpture he was holding, or an ancient painting on paper than could disintegrate from just a finger that was too oily. He stared at it, biting his lip, taking in every stroke, every color carefully, making sure not to miss a thing.

It was a bit awkward, honestly. He sat silently drinking it in for far longer than she was used to when she showed anyone her work and she forced herself to fight the urge to fidget with her pencil on the table. She kept her hands still in her lap as she watched him. She wouldn't let her unnerve him.

Besides, he was a history professor, so what if he didn't like it? He probably didn't know much about art anyway. Plus she didn't draw it for anyone, she just drew it for herself. It was a silly little sketch is all it didn't really matter—

"Persephone," he said suddenly. She looked away from where her hands were clenched in her fist and met his eye. "Am I right?" he asked her. "It's about Persephone."

She nodded, smiling. She felt a gust of breath slip out.

He handed the book back to her.

"Why the flower, though?" he asked pointing to where a flower was pushing up through cold, blackened stone in her sketch. It sat next to a pomegranate that had been dropped, cracked into three pieces—one large, two smaller—whose juices were spilling out, seeping into the cracks in the stone where the flower was pushing out.

"It's based on a poem," she said, taking her sketchbook back. "_'I will return here, a seed,'_" she quoted.

"So she wants to go back," Professor Blake, concluded.

Clarke chewed her lip. "I used to hate the story of Persephone and Hades. I thought it was terrible. A poor little girl being abducted down into the underworld, tricked into staying?" she wrinkled her nose and he laughed good naturedly at her. "It sounded awful to me. But then I read this book that said she wasn't abducted. It said that Persephone hated the screams and cries she heard from the underworld, so she offered herself up willingly. She wanted to go, to help those people. And I loved that version of the story."

"I've heard that one before," he murmured, nodding.

"There's a lot of poetry based on it," she continued. "And that line is from one where she writes letters to her mother while she's in the underworld. And she starts off curious, learning new things. Then she grows a bit homesick. But it's the way she ends it that always stuck with me. '_I will return here a seed,'_" she repeated.

"So she left a flower to bloom there in her absence," he said.

She beamed. "Yes," she said. "Exactly."

It wasn't often that she didn't have to spell out exactly what she was aiming for in her drawings. Her friends loved them, they thought they were beautiful, but they didn't really _get_ art. It was refreshing to have him guess right the first time.

"Well," he said, leaning back in his chair, coffee in hand once more. "It's beautiful Really Clarke, it's incredible."

She felt a slow heat creep into her cheeks, burning its way up from her neck. "Thanks, Professor."

He pressed his chin into his chest, smiling softly to himself. He had a curious look on his face, as if he was debating what he wanted to say next. Finally, he looked up at her.

"I think," he started slowly. "Since we're not in class, you can just call me Bellamy."


	3. Chapter 3

He learned, in the week that followed, that he should not have let her call him by his first name.

It was a terrible idea, and he wondered how he had ever thought it was a good idea, because at least 'Professor' reminded him that he was a teacher now, a professional, a person that people were not only encouraged but expected to listen to. He was supposed to stand tall at the front of the room and put a wall between him and his students, and teach them about Ancient Religions, and mythology and history and not run into all over campus. He wasn't supposed to get emails from his students with poems that they read that reminded them of that day's lesson and he wasn't supposed to spend the next hour or two searching for a poem or a book to send back, saying _"Well if you liked that, consider checking this one out"_ because it wasn't part of his job and he wouldn't have done it for that kid Craig, who sat in the front and argued with him about everything, but when Clarke skipped down the steps of the classroom to the front and called his name, handing him a book, he suddenly didn't care that he was a professor and that she was his student, because all he wanted to do was take her somewhere to pour over the pages and watch her sketch as he read out loud and that was very, very _bad_.

He learned it first at the coffee cart outside the history building where he'd stopped to get his morning coffee. She was in line ahead of him, juggling three different bags and a change purse which she had been rifling through as the barista stood behind the cart, looking bored, holding out her coffee.

"Here," she'd said roughly, not noticing anything around her. "Just keep the change." She'd shoved a few bills into the boys hand and went to grab her coffee, having forgotten her open change purse which tipped as she leaned forward, scattering coins everywhere on the sidewalk in front of her.

"Shit," she grumbled. She put her coffee down on the ground beside her as she squatted down to gather everything up. A few coins had rolled further away from where she rested, anchored to the ground by her overflowing bags, so he stepped aside letting the student behind him order, and moved to pick up the few still rolling away.

He had a handful of change when he made his way back over to her, finding her still on the ground, shoving coins back into the purse, and stuffing books bag into the bag that had tipped partially open when it collided against the pavement.

"Here," he said crouching down to meet her. "You had some runaways."

Her head lifted up and met his gaze, and he noticed the flush on her cheeks and the way her hard eyes softened when they took in his hand and the person it was attached to.

"Oh, Bellamy! Hi," she said, sounding surprised. "Thanks."

He suddenly forgot exactly what he had sat himself down on the ground to do, the tug of a tiny knot in the middle of his ribcage distracting him, and all he could feel was the heat on his neck and the cold stone pressing into his knees. His hand felt heavy, and sweaty, and when he looked at it he realized that he was clutching a fist full of quarters—Clarke's quarters—in the palm of his hand as he knelt there staring at her.

"Um, Bellamy?"

There it was again, the tiny knot in his chest and he wanted to back away, into the lecture hall and out seven rows of desks, along with the table at the front of the room between them.

She was biting her lip looking at him curiously and it was very, very not good.

"Right, uh, here," he grabbed her hand (forcing himself not to wince when he remembered how clammy the palms of his hands felt. He was a professor for Pete's sake, he would not be embarrassed about sweaty hands in front of a student) and emptied the coins from his hand into hers.

"Thanks," she said again, smiling.

"Yeah," he said standing up quickly, stepping back, knocking into a girl standing in line at the coffee cart. "Oh sorry," he muttered to her and then turned to Clarke. "Yeah, no problem. I'll see you in class."

The next time he realized how very, very stupid it was for him to tell her to call him Bellamy, he was at a museum, a few blocks away from campus, checking out an exhibit on Greek myth inspired pieces.

He found himself wandering the halls of the museum, shaking his head when the woman at the front desk asked him if he wanted someone to show him around. It was crowded, more crowded than he would have expected—the school he had gone to funded a little art museum on campus and it was almost always empty. But he was forced to weave in and out of crowds in order to get to the pieces he wanted to look at. Kids, younger than his own students, stood in clumps in front of each painting he had been hoping to see and stood in circles around every sculpture or vase he'd seen displayed in the pamphlet advertising this exhibit. At first he tried to crane his neck over their heads, and just stand behind them, but the groups of students came in cycles, and once he got into a good spot behind one student, they would move and before he could step up, a different flock would filter into the space.

At one point he ducked into a corner away from everyone to get his bearings. It was a little overwhelming.

"High school field trip," he heard a familiar voice behind him. He spun around and saw Clarke smiling at him, dressed in dress pants and a blazer, with a name tag clipped onto the breast pocket. Her hair was pinned back into a slick bun, and she held a water bottle in one hand and a clipboard in the other. She held the water bottle out to him.

"Sorry?" he said, confused. He took the water bottle, not having realized until she offered it how thirsty he was. Quickly he unscrewed the cap and took a sip, feeling it cool the heat that had been building in his cheeks.

"Ark High. All the seniors are here on a field trip for school. That's why it's so crowded." She pointed to the clumps of students with big bulky backpacks and the few adults standing around staring at the students instead of the art, keeping a close eye on one particularly rowdy kid who kept stepping a little too close to the pottery display.

Bellamy nodded as he swallowed. "I guess I picked the wrong day to come then," he said.

Clarke gave him another smile. "It's not usually this crowded on weekdays. Or ever, really," she said. "It's usually quiet in here. If you come back another day, it would probably definitely be less crowded. You might even be the only one here!" she said with a laugh. "I could give you a tour, if you wanted to come back." She was nodding as she offered as if she was planning it already and he forced himself to stand a little taller, hoping to get a bit of the authority he was supposed to have back.

He was going to tell her no, he was going to shake his head and say he couldn't, that he was too busy teaching and grading, and that it'd be too weird to get a tour from his student, especially if the museum would be as empty as she promised and it would just be the two of them, alone, with the paintings and the sculptures and the big white walls, and Clarke with her hair pinned up and her blazer, taking him around teaching him for a change.

"You work here?" he said instead.

"Internship for class credit," she explained.

He wasn't sure what to say next because he couldn't say that he'd love a tour, or that he'd been hoping to see something more like the sketch she showed him at the café on display, so he just nodded and waited for her to say she had to leave him.

She sat down on the bench that his knees were brushing and nodded to the spot next to her, so he sat down next to her.

"So, Bellamy" she said, and he felt the knot again. "What brings you to our little museum?"

Digging into his pocket, he pulled out the pamphlet that he'd found slipped under the door to his office, advertising the exhibit.

"_Someone_," he said, raising an accusatory eyebrow at her, looking away when a blush crept onto her face at his accusation. "Slipped this under the door to my office, and I thought I might offer extra credit to students who came to it, but I wanted to check it out first."

"And what do you make of it?"

He took a deep breath. "I'm not too sure, I haven't gotten to see much of it. Though, I do think it could be improved by the addition of one particular piece."

"Oh yeah?" she asked. Her eyebrows were raised, as if she didn't believe he actually knew enough about art to make any serious suggestions. "Which piece is that?"

"The one you showed me in the café the other day," he said. He wanted to cut his own tongue off as soon as the words slipped past, but it was too late, and, he noticed bitterly, the floor didn't seem to be opening up to swallow him whole, so he sat, a pulsing heat coursing over him, hoping to make his escape soon.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Something about this girl made him very stupid.

"Shut up," she scoffed, shoving at his shoulder, but he caught the flush of red working its way up her neck, and he couldn't help but smile.

It turned out that she had prints of a lot of the paintings on her clipboard, little facts about them written under (he learned later that they weren't the ones she had to have memorized for tours, but other little things she found out about the artists or the piece that she thought were interesting and wanted to remember to tell the tour groups) and she let him flip through them as she scooted closer to see which one he was looking at so she could give him the background on each one.

He hadn't heard of most of the artists, but he'd never been good with art, so when Clarke would tell him something about the painter, he'd swap it for a little known fact about the myth they based their work on.

He should have left much sooner than he did, but they went through every piece she had on her clipboard and then she started telling him about the exhibit they had there the month before and he found himself leaning against the wall, letting himself get comfortable as she described her favorite painting.

He'd nearly forgotten himself when his phone buzzed and he pulled it out to see a text from Octavia.

_Omg, you didn't even call me today! Did you finally get a social life big brother?_

It was like a bucket of ice cold water being dumped over his head, because sitting on a bench in a crowded museum with one of his students for hours wasn't a social life. It wasn't appropriate at all, and he should have known better, and left sooner, and he should never have sat down in the first place and he should have told Clarke to call him Professor again.

"Bellamy?" she said pulling him back to where he was. "Are you okay?"

He stood up abruptly, ignoring the confused look on Clarke's face. "Yeah, uh, yeah, I just remembered that I have to go. I have a, uh, meeting. To get to."

He stuffed his phone in his pocket and started walking away. He turned around once he was a few feet away. "I'll, uh, see in you in class, Clarke."

She nodded, and stayed on the bench, a crease having worked its way between her eyebrows.

Clarke held her breath and knocked once on the door, ignoring the aching in the balls of her feet as she bounced up and down and up and down again and again and again as she waited for him to answer. She heard him clear his throat and the back of her neck prickled.

She hadn't emailed him or gone up to him after class since he'd been to the museum, and she knew it was stupid and immature to avoid him after he'd left so abruptly, because he probably did have a meeting to go to, because he was a professor, he was her professor, and that's part of what professors did, and it wasn't personal, and he'd sat and talked with her for far longer than she was allowed to sit and talk in the museum anyway. But a tiny little voice in the back of her head told her that it wasn't a meeting, it was her and she had overstepped and made him uncomfortable, or just bored him, so she'd avoided him before and after class for that entire week.

"Come in," she heard him say from the other side of the door.

She shook her arms out once at her sides. There was no reason for her to act like this. She was just there to talk about her paper. It was normal for students to talk to their professors' about their papers. Why would she be nervous? This was just _Bellamy_, she thought.

No. It wasn't _Bellamy_, what was she thinking? It was her teacher. Her professor. Professor Blake. So what if they'd sort of become friends? It didn't mean anything. Maybe they weren't even friends. Maybe she was just projecting. He was her teacher. She was his student. And she was there to talk about her paper.

She took a breath and pushed the door open.

He turned around as she slid it shut behind her. "Clarke!" He smiled over at her, from his desk. "Excellent, I was hoping you'd stop in."

"Hi, Bellamy," she said, unsure if it counted as 'in class' when she was in his office, talking about a paper, or if she was still allowed to call him Bellamy. He smiled when she greeted him, but looked away. She wasn't sure what to do, so she sat in the chair next to his. His office was small, set up with a desk along the right wall and a bookcase along the back and left, shelves nailed into the wall above his desk. The chair she sat in was next to the door.

He spun in his chair to face her.

"Your paper was really good, Clarke," he said, resting his elbows on his knees in front of him. "One of the best in the class. There's honestly not a lot I can say about it."

"Oh," she said, wondering what she was doing there then, and feeling like she was being dismissed. "Thank you."

"I just wanted to check in with you. You've been quieter in class this past week, and I want to make sure you aren't going to slip back into old habits."

He was smiling at her so she felt herself ease up a bit. She uncrossed her legs and stopped playing with the hem of her shirt.

"No, don't worry," she said, flashing him a smile. "I've just been a bit preoccupied this week that's all. I'll be back to annoying you throughout the lecture next week."

His laugh tumbled out and the room felt a bit warmer, and a bit smaller and she wondered if it was just her.

"Good," he said. "I missed hearing what you had to say."

He handed her a copy of her paper with a few notes on it, and she couldn't help but laugh when she saw his handwriting. It was thin and neat and much loopier than she ever would have imagined it to be. They only spent a few minutes talking about it, and Clarke sighed, knowing there was no real reason for her to stick around.

As she stood to leave she caught sight of a book on his shelf and she walked over to it. She pulled it out, flipping to get to the poem she wanted.

Bellamy stood up as well and walked over to her. She pointed to the page she had landed on.

"There was a painting at the museum based on the furies. Horrifying and gruesome, but beautiful. It wasn't in the packet I showed you," she explained. "We weren't supposed to show that one to the kids." He just nodded looking over at her. "Do you think you'll come back? To the museum? I could show it to you."

She felt the question hang in the air, and she knew she shouldn't have brought it up again. If he didn't take her up on the offer to get a private tour the first time, she doubted he would now. But she couldn't help but ask.

He ducked his head, his right arm reaching up to rub at his neck.

"Clarke," he started to say, and she felt it, the wave of embarrassment push itself off of him and onto her.

"No," she said quickly, before he could say anything that would ruin whatever sort of weird friendship they had going. "You're probably really busy with grading, I didn't think of that. And I'm sure you've seen loads of paintings about the Furies—"

"Clarke."

He was closer suddenly. And the book was back on the shelf and she hadn't even noticed he had taken it out of her hands and she was rambling and he was smiling down at her and _man_, he was tall, and all she could see was the tanned brown of his skin with his freckles popping out on his cheeks and over his nose, and she probably should have just taken a step back but instead she stayed where she was.

"What?" she said, cursing herself for how soft her voice had become.

"I want to. I'd love for you to give me a tour," he said. "But I shouldn't."

She didn't understand. She worked at the museum, it was part of her job, and he was sort of her friend, but also her teacher, and she could give teachers tours if they came in.

"Why?" she asked, and she felt like she'd never sounded more like a child.

"Clarke…"

"It's just a tour, Bellamy!" Her voice was raised again and right as his name slipped past her lips she felt his eyes latch onto them and suddenly there wasn't any space between them because Bellamy had stepped closer and closer and closer until his chest was pressed against hers and his hand was on the back of her neck and his lips were moving against hers. Her hand came up to his chest and she gathered the fabric in her fingers, pulling him closer when there was nowhere closer to go, but she could feel the heat she thought had been just her radiating off of him and she sighed into the kiss.

Abruptly he pulled away.


	4. Chapter 4

There was this guy Atom who grew up down the street from Bellamy and Octavia when they were kids. He was a little bit younger than Bellamy and a little bit older than Octavia, and he didn't have many other friends so most summers, he'd wind up with Octavia and Bellamy and his friends when they would play pick up baseball in the middle of the neighborhoods. He at first he was quiet and shy, and he stuck close to Octavia, because the older kids intimidated him, and nobody ever messed with Octavia because they knew that even if Bellamy didn't catch them, Octavia would kick their asses herself.

Octavia had had a huge crush on Atom. He was older and he was nice to her, and not a lot of the older kids paid much attention to her, except Bellamy but he was her brother so she always told him that he didn't count. Atom didn't catch on right away, he wasn't exceptionally perceptive. But once he did, everyone else started to notice too, and all the other boys would tease him, slip sly little comments his way when Bellamy wasn't around and Octavia was too distracted to notice.

Eventually, Atom was tired of the teasing. He acted like he liked her back. He'd give her a hug when he saw her, he wouldn't pull away if she reached for his hand. He rolled his eyes when the other boys shouted something his way, and then he'd turn to Octavia and ask her to run back home and grab something for him. Or he'd ask her to get Bellamy to do him a favor, or invite him out more. He spent two weeks milking her little crush for everything it was worth until one day he told her that she should just sit on the sidelines and cheer, and she punched him straight in the nose.

Later, she told Bellamy that she'd spent two weeks tugging her hand out of Atom's every time he would ask her to do something, repeating the same thing over and over again every day for two weeks.

"Do I really have to?" she'd say to him. But Atom would just pat her hand and raise his eyebrows at her when he'd stare down at her, waiting for her to give in. Waiting for her to say yes and do whatever he wanted just because she felt like she had to, because she liked him and he was older and she thought that that was just how things worked.

Bellamy's hands were still on her.

They were underneath the shirt he'd rucked up, pressing into the soft flesh of her stomach, rubbing circles in her skin. He hadn't even noticed when his hands had slipped underneath the fabric, but she was still there, still standing, pressing her stomach in to the palms of his hands and he knew he should pull them away, stuff them in his pockets or sit on them or both, but he was afraid that once he pulled them away he'd never put them back.

But at the same time he was terrified that that was what he was afraid of.

She was looking up at him with curious eyes. He opened his mouth to explain but couldn't think of anything to say that would make any sense and all he could think about was Atom from down the road, holding Octavia's hand before dumping his bag or his books into her arms while he ran off to toss a ball back and forth between him and some other kid on the street.

She took his silence as something else, and trailed her hands from where they were resting, fingers tangled in the collar of his shirt, down to his chest, sweeping her hands up and down. She stepped closer.

"Clarke," he said. He dropped his hands from her stomach, feeling a chill fill the room and surround him, dumping over his body and shocking him back into reality. He took a few more steps back, until his legs were pressed into his desk behind him and he wanted to keep going, to saw his way through the wood to get to the opposite wall, but he dropped his hands down beside the backs of his legs and gripped the edge of the desk to keep him anchored.

"Oh my god," he muttered to himself.

Her paper was sitting there, on his desk, right next to his left hand. He could stretch his pinky out and touch it. And here she was in his office, his _office_ _Jesus Christ_, where she had come to talk about her grade and he had been hoping to hear her thoughts from the weeks lectures and instead he had spent her visit to his office hours pressing her into his bookshelf, groping his student, and _oh my god_ he was going to be fired and his teaching license was going to be taken away, she was still looking at him with those big eyes and he could just push himself up off the desk and pull her close again, but he couldn't be Atom and he couldn't make Clarke like Octavia, with her cheeks puffed out as she stomped down the street to get Atom whatever he wanted just because she felt like she had to.

"_Do I really have to?_" he could hear her saying as he would wrap his hands around her waist and pull her in close. And he would just raise an eyebrow and look down at her waiting for her to huff out a sigh and close the distance between their lips.

"Oh my god," he whispered again. He dragged his hands through his hair, giving it a few solid tugs, and he just left his arms there on top of his head because he had no idea what to do, no idea where to go from there, but he sure as hell couldn't move from where he sat on his desk. Not until she picked up her bag and slipped out his door. Maybe not even then. Not until she was out of the building. Not until she was off of the campus. Not until then.

"From the sounds of it, that _oh my god_ doesn't seem to be quite the same _oh my god_ as is running through my head right about now," Clarke interrupted his thoughts.

"No," he managed to croak out. "I mean—yes the same _oh my god_ has been running through my head for the last ten minutes—but no, I mean this oh my god is more of an _oh my god_ _what the fuck is wrong with me_, so no, probably a bit different."

The same _oh my god_ was still running through his head, and it was always running through his head when he was around her. Now it was just amplified, plugged into a jumbotron and made fifty times bigger—impossible to ignore when he needed most to ignore it.

"Anyway I can drag you back over to my version of _oh my god_, and make you forget about yours?" She said stepping closer to him, which only made him throw his hand up between them to stop her, and slide along the desk until he was at the edge farthest away from her.

_Yes_, he thought. _Several ways in fact_.

He shook his head. "No. No, I think I need to stay firmly within the boundaries of my own _oh my god_, and leave your _oh my god_ far, far away."

"How many more times do you think we can say _oh my god_ in one conversation?" she joked.

Bellamy groaned.

"Bellamy—" she started again, but he just held his hand up.

"Don't," he said.

She ignored him, and took a step closer. "I kissed you back. I pulled you down. I wanted it, I want—"

He couldn't listen to her. He couldn't hear it because she couldn't want him, she couldn't stand there in his office, her paper for his class on his desk not two feet away from her, and tell him that she wanted him, because if she did, he didn't think he could do anything to stop himself from letting her. He wanted to let her want him and he wanted her to let him want her in return but they shouldn't, they _couldn't_ and that's all that mattered so he dragged a hand over his face and stepped away.

"Clarke, stop."

"I want you," she said quietly anyway.

"No," he said firmly. He squeezed his eyes shut so that he couldn't see her anymore. He couldn't focus with her cheeks flushed or her lips swollen or her dark eyes staring back at him. "You don't. Or you shouldn't. You can't. _We_ can't."

The palms of his hands were still tingling from where they rested on her skin only moments before and he shoved them into his pockets because it didn't matter. It didn't matter that he felt like the room was on fire or that his throat was suddenly dry or that his thoughts were jumbled up inside his brain, breaking and bending and mixing together until nothing made sense, until he couldn't think anything and he had to cling hard to one idea which was just "_Can't, shouldn't, wrong._"

"Why not?"

She wasn't pouting. She wasn't wining. She was smiling at him. She was dangling it in front of him, she was daring him to grab it, to grab her, to hell with the consequences.

"I'm your professor, Clarke."

Clarke rolled her eyes at him. She picked up her bag up off the ground in front of the bookcase and slipped her paper into it.

"Alright then, Professor," she said. "I guess I'll see you in class."

She walked out the door and Bellamy let himself collapse back into his desk chair, facing steadily away from the bookcase for the rest of the day.

She pulled her coat around her tightly as she walked out of the building. Autumn was creeping away and the chill in the air was running over every exposed bit of her skin, biting into her and she couldn't help but feel bitter about how ironically appropriate the weather was for her mood.

She'd probably just made a fool of herself, probably humiliated herself beyond repair.

"_I want you_," she'd told him. Jesus. As if she wasn't pathetic enough for pulling him into her as she backed up into his bookcase. As if she wasn't pathetic enough or reaching out to someone who'd already pulled away.

She'd kissed her professor. In his office. During his _office hours_. She wasn't even creative about it, she used a _poem_ for crying out loud. She was a complete cliché. She could practically hear Raven ripping on her about it already.

She wasn't sure how she was going to be able to sit through his class ever again. She tried to imagine herself sitting in her desk toward the back of the room, listening to him lecture on, in the same voice that she'd heard breath her name in her ear, writing on the board with the same hands that had wrapped around her middle, rough, calloused palms scratching into her stomach when he moved them around, underneath her shirt.

Oh, god, it was going to be torture. She was going to have to sit through three hours a week of uncomfortable eye contact and forced pleasantries for the rest of the semester.

She jammed her key into her apartment door.

Whatever, she thought. She'd get over it. It was just a crush. It had snuck up on her a bit so she didn't know how to deal with it, but once she had a chance to process it, she'd be fine. She'd go to class. She'd raise her hand. She'd argue with him as usual. She'd forget the feeling of him touching her, because she hardly knew it at all, and he'd go back to being her professor and her sort of friend, and everything would be fine.

She took a deep breath and shook her head, pushing him out of it, and stepped into her apartment.

He didn't know what he was expecting from her in class, but he expected it to be at least a _little_ weird. At first at least. He thought maybe she'd slip in right before class started, or rush out right when it ended, and ignore his glances in her direction. He figured it'd be back to how it was the first week of the semester where her head was ducked down over her notebook for the full hour, barely even glancing up when he dismissed the class.

But it wasn't like that at all. She wasn't making it weird. Which felt…_weird_.

She smiled at him as she walked in the classroom, and asked her usual questions about the readings while the other students filed in. She kept her head up, watching him the whole lecture. She smiled at him when she raised her hand and she argued with him in class and she came down to his desk at the end of class as usual, and showed him another poem she found or asked another question about the material and everything was completely friendly and normal, and nothing seemed different about her.

The only thing that changed was that as she left she'd start throwing a "_see you next class, professor_," over her shoulder, and he couldn't help but think it was a challenge.

"Your tie is crooked again," Bellamy heard from his computer. He glanced up at himself in the mirror, seeing that Octavia was right and it was skewed off to the side. Quickly, he straightened it before plopping back down in front of his laptop screen.

"Relax big brother," she said. "It's a free meal. Who cares if you have to wear a suit? You look good. Important."

"I'm not worried about how I look," he said. "And it's not free, I had to donate money to RSVP yes to this thing."

Octavia rolled her eyes at him, slurping down some more Ramen noodles. She held her bowl up to the webcam. "I'll trade with you, you can have my Ramen and I'll get all dressed up and go to a fancy dinner where there's probably steak. Oh! And lobster, be sure to get the lobster, Bell."

Bellamy fidgeted with his tie again. "Stop eating that crap," he scolded. "I'll send you some money so you can have a real meal now and again."

He wasn't nervous about how he looked. He knew he looked fine. It wasn't hard to put a suit on. But he'd never been to a faculty event before. He only knew a few of the other history professors, and he was by far the youngest one in the department. He was probably going to wind up spending the evening pushed away in the corner, nursing a drink after fumbling through half a dozen attempts at small talk.

"I can pay for my own food," Octavia said. "And just take a breath. Try and have a good time. Make a nerdy friend or something."

Bellamy had already fumbled through four attempts at small talk.

He hated small talk, why did anyone bother with small talk? It was horrible and awkward and pointless, and Bellamy thought that if he had to answer one more question about how he was adjusting to the new job or if he liked the weather here more than where he moved from, then he might just take the tie from around his neck and give it good hard pull.

The worst part was that nobody else had to do the whole small talk thing. It wasn't a terribly large university, and most of the faculty had been working there for years. They were at least somewhat familiar with each other, while there he was, standing just outside of three different clumps of people, deciding whether or not he should just try and join in, or if he should make his way back to the bar and settle in there for a bit.

Before he made up his mind, a familiar voice came from behind him.

"So," she said, puffing up her chest and sticking her nose up in the air. "How do you feel you're adjusting to Ark University, Professor Blake? Figures as soon as you get out of college, you're pulled right back in!"

She barked out a laugh at her own horrible joke (much like every other person he'd spoken to that night) and raised her eyebrows at him, waiting for him to play along.

"Clarke," he said a bit dumbly. "What are you doing here?"

Her face dropped a bit, disappointed in his reaction, but he couldn't think of how she got there, _why_ she was there, in the one place he was supposed to have been guaranteed not to see her, where he could stop thinking about her because nothing around him was supposed to remind him of her, or look like her or sound like her, or—

"My mom's the Dean," she interrupted his thoughts. "She always makes me come to things like this. Thinks it'll help me network or something."

"Oh," he said. He wasn't sure what else he could say. Suddenly it didn't seem so ridiculous to talk about the weather.

"So," he tried again. "How are you?"

Clarke rolled her eyes at him, not answering right away. He finally looked at her, actually let himself look at her, having been too startled before to register anything other than _"Clarke. Here. Speaking,"_ when she'd come up to him earlier. She looked good. Well, she always did, but she looked _good_. He sort of hated it. Her hair was twisted up above her neck, leaving the pale skin below exposed. Her dress was clingy and black. It was awful, the worst dress he'd ever seen and he wanted it _gone_. She had a smirk plastered to her face when his eyes trailed back up.

"Oh, I'm great, _Professor_, how are you?"

He thought back to all the times he wished he never let her call him Bellamy, and wanted to kick himself, because in that moment it was all he wanted to hear her say.

"Clarke," he pleaded, unsure of what he was asking for. He shook his head. "Is there somewhere we can talk? Privately?"

Clarke sighed and nodded, gesturing for him to follow her as they made their way out of the main hall. To his surprise, she didn't have anywhere in particular in mind, so once they were out she glanced around the hallway a few times before shrugging and pulling him into the coat room behind him. She pulled the door shut as soon as he stepped inside.

"Okay," she crossed her arms and took a step back. "Talk."

Her playful tone was gone, and she wasn't smirking at him anymore. She even looked a bit, well, _small,_ curled in on herself, pressed as far away from him as she could get.

He rubbed a hand over his face, hating himself for even putting her in the position to look like that. "I crossed a line," he said. "I shouldn't done—I shouldn't have put you—I crossed a line. And I'm sorry."

"Bellamy," she sighed, squeezing her eyes closed.

"No," he said. "I did."

She ran a hand over her forehead. "Look," she said. "I'm not going to do this. You've said your piece, it was a mistake, you regret it, it's not going to happen again, I get it. I don't need to hear it four different ways." She slumped back against the wall. "Let's just go back to being student and professor, okay? I'm fine."

"I'm not," he said without thinking.

"What?"

"I'm not fine." He was backing himself into a corner, he knew it. It was a terrible idea, one that he'd be kicking himself over later, but it was too late. The thought was out there.

"You were—it's just," he wasn't sure how to say it. _You were the only person who actually made me give a shit_, he wanted to say. _You were the first person here to get me. The only person here to really get me_. "I don't have a lot of friends here. I haven't really met anyone outside of my roommate and a few other professors. You were—you were someone I could talk to."

"You can still talk to me," she said. She wasn't pressed into the back wall anymore, and at some point when he'd been wrestling with his words she'd moved a bit closer to him. Her usual smile wasn't back on her face, but her eyes didn't seem as hard, they didn't force a chill to run down him when they looked at him.

"No," he said. "I can't."

A small frown worked its way onto her face, tugging the corner of her lips down, and he reached a hand out without thinking of what he was doing, not thinking of what it meant or what happened after his fingers brushed the side of her mouth, just knowing he wanted to press his thumb onto her skin, to wipe the frown out of the corner, to make it go away. So he reached his hand out and let his fingers skim against her flushed cheek as his thumb fell down against her lips.

"I can't talk to you anymore because you're brilliant. And I want to hear everything, I want to talk to you about whatever you want to say, and I want you to want the same thing." He was a step closer, his chin tucked down into his chest to look down at her, his hand still resting on her cheek. He felt a heat work its way up from her neck right underneath the pads of his fingers. His voice had gotten low and scratchy, and he felt his own skin prickle with sweat, and he knew, he _knew _he should get out, he should slip his hand into his pocket and get out of there, but he felt weighed down, glued to his spot just in front of her.

"But I can't, because if you do then I'll never want to stop and we'll be right back here. And all I'll be able to think about was how good it felt to have you pressed up against me, to have your hands pulling me down, holding me into you, to have your—"

"Bellamy," she cut him off with a strangled voice, and he looked down at her eyes, dark and wide and staring back at him.

And then all he felt were her lips and her hands pushing against him. She backed him up against the door, her hands burning into his shirt on his chest, her lips moving against his and everything he'd been thinking, every reason he had for walking out the door, for leaving the banquet, for going back home and taking an ice cold shower, suddenly seemed like the stupidest things in the world as they floated out of his head to make room for her.

She held him there for a few seconds while he caught up, his hands moving down from her face, skimming along the sides of her dress, then grabbing her ass, pulling her in closer to him. He felt her stomach press against his, her chest rubbing into his own and he pulled her in a little tighter, letting one soft sigh escape as she grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and did the same.

Suddenly her hands slid down from his chest and started rucking up his shirt, untucking it from his pants, and she moved her mouth from his lips to his neck as her fingers tickled their way up his torso, unbuttoning his shirt as she went.

"Clarke," he managed to choke out. "We really—"

"I want you," she said pulling away. "Do you want me?"

And _fuck_, that was unfair. There she stood in front him, her hair spilling out of whatever pins it had been held up in, trickling down her neck. Her cheeks were flushed red and her eyes were so dark he could barely see even the tiniest line of color circling her pupils. Her lips were red and swollen and she flicked her tongue out over her bottom lip as she waited for him to answer, her chest heaving, catching her breath, and it was all he could do not to slip his fingers under the straps of her dress and pull it down until it was pooling at their feet.

"Fuck it," he breathed, and he crushed his mouth back into hers, his hands wrapping down and around her ass until they landed on the back of her thighs and he lifted her up, her legs wrapping around his waist, and he pressed her back into the wall.

She took one arm away from him and shoved the straps of her dress down, trying to push it past her chest, but losing her balance. He took a hand from where it rested at the small of her back and he helped her push it down to her hips, revealing a black lacy bra underneath the thin fabric of the dress.

_Jesus_, he thought but he must have said it out loud, because she was shaking against him, a giggle slipping past her lips. It felt so good to hold her there while she laughed her body moving up and down against his own.

He dipped his head down, kissing her neck, her collar, slowly moving his mouth over her shoulder, making his way down to her breasts. He felt her breath quicken beneath him and he slowed down, enjoying the way he could feel her lungs expand her chest beneath his mouth, smiling at the feeling of her hands trying to tug him closer, to urge him on faster.

Her eyes had fluttered shut and her head had tipped back against the wall, her neck curved, exposed and he couldn't help but trail his tongue back up from her chest to her neck.

"Bellamy," she groaned. She was pressing harder into him, grinding up and down against him as much as she could with her legs still firmly around his waist and her back pressed into the wall. He couldn't control the buck of his hips at her movement, and she smiled and did it again. She tightened the grip of her legs on his hips and moved herself up and down against him, slowly, his forehead dropped down onto her shoulder as she teased him over and over and over again until he was nearly whimpering into her skin.

He slipped a hand underneath her dress, bunched up at her hips, his fingers trailing over her panties, his breath catching at how wet they were, before she pressed her hips forward, forcing his hand closer. He moved his thumb over her clit and rubbed slow circles into her, while his lips burned their way across the soft skin of her chest. When he looked up he could see her biting her lip, her brow furrowed together. She kept lifting her hips, pressing the pads of his fingers harder against her and he moved his hands until he was teasing her entrance.

"Bellamy," she said again, breathless, and he pressed his fingers closer, hoping to hear her say his name like that again. "Want—you," she said. Her hands moved down, grappling with the button of his pants, flicking it open and pushing the zipper down, pressing the fabric at his hips down as far as she could.

"Shit, Clarke," he breathed. Her hand was slipping under his briefs. "I don't—have—a condom," he sputtered out, pulling back from her.

She slipped her legs down from his hips and pointed to the wall where she'd been standing before. "Purse," she said simply.

He fumbled over to it and brought it back over to where Clarke stood, slumped against the wall. Her dress was crumpled, pushed below her chest but hiked up above her hips, leaving a bunched up strip of fabric covering just the smallest bit of her stomach, her lacy black bra and panties the only other things covering her. She fished it out and handed it to him, making quick work of pushing her dress the rest of the way down and stepping out of it, before doing the same to her underwear.

When she was ready, he stepped closer to her, suddenly unsure all over again. She must have sensed it, maybe it had been written all over his face how unsure he was, because she lifted her hand to his cheek, and stroked her thumb along his skin before pushing herself up on her toes to press a soft kiss to his lips.

"I want you," she whispered. "Not because you want me, and not because I feel like I have to. I just want you."

She waited for him to answer, but all he could do was nod, and then she pulled him in close again, and he couldn't think anymore because all he could feel, all there was, was her.

Clarke's phone lit up from where is sat on the worn down bar. She glanced down at it and saw Bellamy's name flashing up at her, and had to suppress a smile. She bit the inside of her cheek and turned back to Raven who was still carrying on about whatever idiot she had to deal with at work that day, and she tried to school her face into looking relatively interested.

"I mean it's like these people find the parts of their cars that are the hardest to break—and the biggest pain in my ass to replace of course—and wreck them through sheer stupidity and force of will." Raven took a sip from her drink before turning back to face Clarke. "What's with your face?"

"What?" Clarke said. "Nothing. This is how my face always is."

Raven scoffed and raised an eyebrow at her. It was uncanny how well Raven could read her, after only knowing her for a few months.

"No," Raven dragged the word out. "That's not how your face always is. It is however, how your face has looked since you stumbled back into the apartment last night with your hair decidedly _not_ in the pins I spent two hours fixing for you."

Clarke turned her face away. She glanced back down at her phone, but she didn't open Bellamy's message. It was girl's night. Roommate night. She felt she had hardly seen Raven in weeks, and she wasn't going to blow her off no matter what Bellamy had to say.

She wasn't even sure what she and Bellamy were. Teacher and student? No, that she was sure of. That wasn't all they were. Friends? Friends with benefits? Some wildly inappropriate form of extra credit for her?

They hadn't said much after, last night. Nothing definitive. Stupid little murmurings about how they wanted it, and it was good, and his voice whispered in her ear that he _liked her_, and that _she was amazing_, but that didn't exactly make things any clearer.

"Who's that?" Raven asked smirking. "Mystery man?"

"He's not a mystery," Clarke muttered flushing.

"You haven't told me anything about him," Raven pointed out. "He's a mystery to me."

Clarke sighed. Talking about Bellamy to her friends could only lead to complications.

"It's…complicated," Clarke offered. Raven sat quietly, and Clarke knew she wasn't getting out of explaining. "He's sort of…my professor."

"No shit, Clarke!" Raven punched her in the arm affectionately. "Damn, girl. Didn't take you for a May-December kind of girl."

Clarke shrugged out of her touch. "Raven! Gross, it's not May-December. He's young, okay? Jesus."

Raven just waggled her eyebrows at her as she took another sip.

"Well, either way, you look happy," she said setting her glass down. Clarke felt a blush creep up onto her neck because happy wasn't exactly how she would have described herself, but it was the only coherent word she could think of, so she just nodded. She could make sense of it all later.

"Good," Raven said. "Well, since you're all blissful and taken, tonight is going to be all about me, then. You are officially appointed my wing woman for the night. Use your powers for good. I'm gonna go get us a round of shots."

"Raven—" Clarke started to protest, but Raven had already hopped off her stool and made her way to the other end of the bar where the bartender was refilling drinks for what looked like and overenthusiastic members of a bachelorette party.

"I'm starting to think all these run-ins aren't on accident anymore," she heard a low voice brush by her ear. "First the museum, then last night, now the bar? Are you following me Clarke?"

Clarke turned on her stool, swiveling to face Bellamy, flashing him a smile as he leaned on the edge of the bar next to her.

"If memory serves, I was in all those places first. Maybe you're following me," she teased.

"No," he smiled. "I just think my luck has finally turned."

She noticed his hand twitch where it rested on the bar, and couldn't help but smile at how incredibly normal it felt to be there, outside school, outside of class, just there at the bar, talking to him, with his hand fidgeting around waiting for the moment it could reach out and touch her.

He huffed out an embarrassed laugh at himself. "Sorry," he said. "That was really cheesy, wasn't it?"

She laughed, too, nodding, hoping he'd take the first step so she wouldn't have to drag him down again.

"Just a little," she agreed. "It's okay, though. Cheesy is good sometimes."

"Yeah?" he asked, taking a step closer, until his hand could dangle off the bar and brush her thigh. She bit back a shudder and scooted to the edge of her stool.

"Yeah," she nodded. "Just sometimes though."

Bellamy leaned closer to her. His freckles were nearly close enough to count, and she almost wanted to try. He licked his lips and opened his mouth to say something to her, but was interrupted by Raven's arm reaching in front of Clarke, breaking them apart, to put a shot down in front of her.

"Drink up, babe, we've got work to do," she said tossing back her own. Once she had, she realized Clarke wasn't alone and she let her eyes run up and down Bellamy, inspecting him. Suddenly her face shifted and she snapped her fingers as something clicked into place in her head.

"Hey," she said. "Bellamy, right? What are the odds, man. Same bar and everything."

Bellamy froze, his hands clenching at his sides. He just looked at Clarke with wide eyes, but said nothing. His mouth was hanging open, but nothing came out, no explanation, no contradiction, nothing.

Clarke didn't understand. She didn't understand what Raven was saying or why Bellamy's face was looking at her like that, pleading with her about something, but she felt like there was a big chunk of information missing from the picture, and she couldn't put it together.

"Y-you guys know each other?" she managed to say.

Bellamy shook his head, ready to explain, but Raven beat him to it with a laugh.

"Well," she joked. "Only in the biblical sense."

Clarke choked on her drink. She waited for Raven to shove her shoulder and tell her she was kidding but she didn't. Suddenly the air in the room felt very cold, and very tight. She felt Bellamy bouncing beside her, waiting for her to look at him, but she couldn't, she couldn't tear her eyes away from her lap, and all she could think was _oh my god_.

_I fucked my professor in a closet at a party_, she thought.

_My professor fucked my roommate in a bar_, she thought.

Her cheeks burned and the words _stupid stupid stupid_ buzzed around her head because she was smarter than the girl who dragged professors into coat rooms and thought that it would end with more than just a fuck. She was smarter than the girl who had completely illicit affairs with her teachers and mistook them for something real. She was smarter than that.

_Then how the fuck did you end up here?_ She thought to herself.

She pushed herself off the stool and grabbed her bag from where it sat on the bar. Raven turned back to her, a confused look on her face.

"I'm sorry, Rae, I-I have to go. I'll see you later okay?" She didn't wait for an answer. She shoved past Bellamy and walked out of the bar, the cold air slapping her face when she made her way down the steps of the bar.

"Clarke!" she heard Bellamy shout behind her, and she walked a bit faster. She held her arm out and waited for a cab to pull up next to her.

"Clarke, please, wait," he put his arm on hers. A cab pulled up and Clarke tore her arm out of his touch and reached for the door.

"You're not letting me explain," he said.

"There's nothing to explain," she said. "Really. I get it. I'm just tired and I'm going to go home."

Bellamy didn't move.

"Clarke—"

She should have just gotten in the cab. She should have gotten in and closed the door and gone back to her apartment where she could sit and process everything, where she could think it all over without freaking out. Where she could find some sort of rational reason for the ache in her chest and the look on his face.

"It's fine, Bellamy. College girls are just your thing," she said. "I made it easy for you."

He stepped back at that. His face crumpled a bit, his brow furrowing and he shook his head. "Fuck, Clarke, that's what you think this is for me?"

"I'll see you in class, Professor," she said. She slid into the cab and closed the door.

"University Village, please," she whispered to the driver, head staring ahead, ignoring the shadow of his figure standing outside the cab in the corner of her eye.

"Sure thing, sweetheart," the cabbie said, and pulled away from the curb.


	5. Chapter 5

_Her back was pressed up against the smooth wood of the door. There was a layer of sweat on her skin, causing her to slide slowly, slowly, slowly down, barely an inch at a time, but enough that she was slouched down, the press of her breath pushing her further with every exhale that slipped out of her lungs. Her feet were splayed out in front of her, one hooked over Bellamy's which were folded toward her, his knees nudging her thighs. _

_He had propped himself on one hand and was leaning into her, his smile pressing into her mouth then her cheek and her neck then her shoulder. His mouth moved its way slowly across her skin, a red flushed wake trailing along her neck and her chest, her arms as he slid his lips over and across and lower. _

_She let herself sigh and dipped her head back, closing her eyes. She let his lips work her slowly back to reality, leaving a small thin film between them and what lay behind the door, in suits and ties and heels and hors d'oeuvres. _

_His hand replaced his mouth at her hip, and she felt his palm rub circles back and forth across her skin. He brought his face back up to hers. _

_"Hey," he said. _

_She laughed and shoved his shoulder. _What a dork_, she thought happily. His hair was sweaty and sticking to his forehead and the nape of his neck, but she trailed her fingers into it anyway, weaving it around her knuckles._

_"Hey," she said back. He just smiled at her. _

_"What are you thinking?" she asked. Because she really couldn't tell. He could be thinking a thousand different things. A million, with the size of his brain. She wanted to make sure the pounding in her chest was for the right reason. _

_"I'm thinking," he said slowly, drawing out the word. "That you're amazing." He pressed a kiss to her shoulder. "And good." Her other shoulder. "And beautiful." The hollow just below her jaw. "And brilliant." Her mouth. _

_His words made her heart race, pounding, thudding against her ribcage, but then slowing way down at the press of his lips into her own, and she was sure it wasn't healthy, it couldn't possibly be healthy how inconsistent her heart rate was, but every move he made caused a flutter in her chest, and every press of his skin into hers made it melt into putty, barely able to pump inside her chest. _

_"I'm thinking," he said again, same teasing tone as before. "That this isn't at all how I expected this night to go."_

_"Is it how you wanted it to go?" she asked, tilting her head to the side, watching him. _

_He pulled back a bit and dropped his gaze down to her leg thrown over his. Her skin was shockingly pale against his tan legs. He traced a finger across her thigh and watched her shiver in response. _

_"Is it what you wanted?" he asked, and suddenly the uncertainty was back in his voice. He tried to play it off as cool and casual, raising an eyebrow without looking up at her, but she felt like there was another question he was asking. She ducked her head to catch his eye, but he was watching his fingers trail back and forth across her leg. _

_She didn't understand him. How he could be so sure one moment and so nervous the next. How he could think she didn't want it, that she didn't want him? She'd said it and she'd said it and she'd said it. I want you I want you I want you. With her mouth and her hands and her eyes, and how could he not know? How could he feel her skin flush under his lips and feel her hands rake into his hair and feel her body pressed in as close to his as she could get, and still not know?_

_She moved a hand down from his hair, linking her fingers into his as they swiped across her skin, goosebumps raising on her thigh. He glanced up at her when her fingers touched his. _

_"I said I did, remember?" she said softly. _

_"Yeah," he murmured back. "But saying it and wanting it are two different things."_

_"I wouldn't have said it if I didn't want it," she said firmly. "Here. I'll say it again. It was what I wanted. I wanted this and I wanted you, and I didn't want it for any reason other than just wanting you." She pulled their linked hands up her leg. "Okay?"_

_"Yeah," he smiled. "Okay."_

_He tipped back, the arm supporting him giving out as he let his back fall against the door next to Clarke. His legs tipped up with the movement, pushing Clarke's knee up in a bend as his own shifted. He straightened up and pulled her into him, her back sliding onto his chest. She was warm and full against him. He let his head dip down between her neck and her shoulder for a moment before he broke the spell._

_"We should probably go," he said, muttering into her skin._

_She sighed. He was right, of course. She was going to have to stand up eventually. She was going to have to pull herself away and stop him from touching her so she could pull her dress back on, and maybe try to arrange her hair back into some semblance of the intricate pins it had been in before, and she was going to have to shove her feet back into her heels and she was going to have to sneak into the bathroom to fix her make up, so that if she ran into her mom, there wouldn't be even more questions than she was already sure she was going to get. She knew she should nod and stand up and put herself together, but she felt his breath push his chest up against her back, and she wanted to let herself forget about everything else for just a few moments longer. _

_"Why?" she asked instead of moving. _

_His breath huffed out, shaking her shoulder. _

_"We're in the coat closet. The party is winding down, somebody might want to leave."_

_"Damn this door for not locking," she joked. She peeled herself away from him and pushed herself up, grabbing her dress from next to their feet as she stood. She pulled it up and over her head, tugging it down, and shoved her feet back into her heels, and grabbed her purse. She leaned back against the wall as he finished getting dressed. _

_His hair was still a mess, and from the way he'd done his tie he may as well have strapped a flashing neon sign to himself, announcing what he'd spent his time at the banquet doing in the coat room. She giggled and ran a hand over his hair, smoothing it a bit, and then reached down and fixed his tie. _

_When she was done, she reached behind him to open the door, but he stopped her before she could. _

_"Hey," he said, looking down at her. "We're good right?"_

_She wasn't sure what he meant, but she nodded along anyway, thinking to herself that if this wasn't good then she had no idea what was. _

_"Yeah," she said. "We're good."_

Fifteen minutes. Clarke was fifteen minutes late. Professor Blake was already in the room, she knew. Her whole class was in the room.

But her feet felt frozen in place. She couldn't bring herself to open the door, to walk in the room, to sit in her desk. She didn't want to spend an hour (well, forty five minutes now) in the back of the room with his voice washing over her, with no way to escape it. She couldn't sit there, she couldn't spend the whole time with her head ducked down to her desk to make sure she didn't see him, and to make sure she didn't see him seeing her. And she couldn't go in and be the student she was before. She couldn't raise her hand or joke, she couldn't go up to him after class, she couldn't ask about the reading.

She couldn't do any of it. So she was standing outside the door, with her hand gripping the handle loosely, deciding whether or not to push, whether or not to leave, whether or not she could just stand there until the class was over ad she wouldn't have to make a decision any more.

_"Bellamy, right? What are the odds, man. Same bar and everything."_

Raven's voice rang in her head.

_"Y-you guys know each other?"_

She hated that she'd sounded like that. Is that how she always sounded? So small and young, and afraid? Naïve? She shouldn't have sounded like that, her voice wasn't supposed to sound like that. Her voice was full and strong and not vulnerable, ever. That's what her voice was supposed to sound like.

Her knuckles tightened over the door handle.

So she'd been played. Who cared? So he wasn't what she thought. And _she_ wasn't what she thought. What did it matter? She made the right choice in walking away at the bar. She'd walked away, because she wasn't going to stand around and wait for him to explain that he thought she knew what it was, or that when he'd asked her _"We're good, right?"_ at that party that he'd meant that they were good, they were settled and there wasn't anything more to it.

She let her hand drop to her side.

She'd made the right choice, walking away at that bar. She did.

She stepped back from the door.

It was the right choice.

She'd fucked up at the banquet. She shouldn't have gone into that closet. She never should have gone to his office hours. She never should have taken the class. But she made the right choice at the bar.

Before she could change her mind, she turned around, and walked out of the building.

She'd made the right choice. She did.

He lingered in the room for longer than he should have.

The students had trickled out nearly ten minutes before, leaving him, sitting alone behind the desk at the front of the room, waiting for something that wasn't going to happen, knowing that he only had about a minute longer to wait for it until Professor Kane came in the room to get ready for his class.

But his legs were lead, anchoring him into the chair.

He pulled out his phone and clicked on his mail app. He started typing.

**To: clarkegrif **

**From: bellamyb **

**Subject: Absence**

Clarke,

I noticed you weren't in class today. I hope everything is okay. I'm sure one of the other students would be willing to give you their notes. Let me know if it's a serious problem and if you'll be missing more classes, we can work something out.

Hope you're well,

Bellamy

The door creaked open and Professor Kane popped into the room.

"Oh," he said, seeing Bellamy still at the desk. "Sorry, I'm a bit early aren't I?"

Bellamy shook his head. He glanced down at his phone, knowing she couldn't possibly have responded in the half minute that had passed, before clicking the screen off and slipping it into his pocket. He stood up.

"No problem, Marcus," he said gathering his folders. "I'm just a little behind schedule is all. I'll be out of your way in a moment."

"Are we going to talk about it?"

Clarke looked up from her sketchbook to see Raven sitting at the other end of the couch. She held out a mug of hot chocolate to Clarke and raised her eyebrows.

"C'mon. It's your favorite. Dark chocolate," she waggled the mug in her hand slightly. "I didn't even use the powder."

Clarke rolled her eyes and set her sketchbook down. She'd been dreading this conversation. She managed to put it off all weekend, avoiding Raven by volunteering to lead tours and teach a few classes at the museum, coming back to the apartment when Raven was out or feigning a migraine and going to her room to take a nap when she was home. She knew Raven probably didn't buy it, she wasn't an idiot. She was surprised Raven let her get away with it for that long anyway.

Sighing, she reached her hands out for the mug. She took a sip and waited for Raven to start. Just because she had to talk about it, didn't mean she had to start the conversation.

"So," Raven said. "Bellamy was your mystery professor?"

Clarke nodded, taking another sip.

"Yeah," she said. "Bellamy was my mystery professor. Not so big a mystery anymore, I guess."

Raven's eyebrows were furrowed. She was playing with the hem of her shirt and wouldn't quite look Clarke in the eye, and Clarke knew Raven and knew that she was biting her tongue, holding back, not wanting to hurt Clarke, but not wanting to hurt her or scare her or piss her off. Something.

"What is it?" Clarke asked.

Raven looked up. "It's not like it's Finn again," she said wincing at her own words. "He didn't cheat on you—"

"Finn didn't cheat on me either," Clarke interjected. "He cheated on _you_."

"Whatever," Raven brushed her off. "It was months ago. It was before the semester even started. He didn't know you."

Clare groaned, rubbing a hand across her eyes. She knew that. She didn't think about it like that. She wasn't jealous, she wasn't worried he wanted Raven more than her. She knew he wasn't Finn. Nothing about it was like Finn.

"Look," Raven said, before she could answer. "You've got to walk me through this because I'm clearly missing something. You've dated guys who've had one night stands before. It's never been like this."

"It's not—it's not that he had one night stands, I don't care about that. I've had one night stands before." Raven snorted. "Okay not a lot of them, but they've happened!"

Clarke bit her lip. It was impossible to say. She couldn't get into it, she just wanted to tuck it away and pretend it never happened.

"Then what is it, babe?" Raven had softened, and she'd moved closer on the couch. She was leaning over her legs, resting one of her hands on Clarke's knee.

"I don't care that he has one night stands," Clarke said again weakly. Raven nodded. "I care—I care that I was one of them."

Raven sat back, her hand sliding off of Clarke's knee and Clarke felt a small chill. She sipped her cocoa to warm herself up and hide her embarrassment at her admission. When she looked at Raven, the other girl was just staring at her with her eyebrows raised, giving her a small shake of her head.

"Clarke," she said. "Come on."

Clarke just shrugged.

"Okay, no," Raven said. "I'm not participating in this little pity party anymore. If that's what you're afraid of—that you're just some random fuck for this guy—then we're talking about two different people here."

"You don't even know him."

Raven sighed. "Maybe. But I'm not blind. And the way he was with you at the bar is not the way guy act with girls they don't give a shit about."

"It was a fuck in a closet. It was exactly what he had with you."

Raven rolled her eyes. "Technically mine was a fuck in a bathroom."

"Oh wow, well then," Clarke said. She put her mug on the table and lifted her blanket off of herself and moved to stand up. "Completely different."

Raven mimicked her movements, and followed her where she'd walked, down their hall into her bedroom. She leaned against Clarke's doorway.

"It is different," she said, eyeing Clarke. "I met him and twenty minutes later we were up against the wall in a bar's grimy bathroom. There was no build up with us like there was with you. We didn't know each other. You did. It's different."

She waited for Clarke to argue or nod or agree with her or tell her to get the hell out of her room, but all she did was sit at her desk and pull her laptop in front of her and lift it open. Raven shook her head and pushed herself off the door frame.

Clarke waited until Raven was back in their living room before she opened her email.

Right at the top of her inbox was one from Bellamy.

**To: clarkegrif **

**From: bellamyb **

**Subject: Absence**

Clarke,

I noticed you weren't in class today. I hope everything is okay. I'm sure one of the other students would be willing to give you their notes. Let me know if it's a serious problem and if you'll be missing more classes, we can work something out.

Hope you're well,

Bellamy

She'd been staring at the same screen for twenty minutes. Her class schedule been sitting in front of her, unchanging, for twenty minutes. She had the mouse settled over one class.

_Don't be a coward, Clarke_, she thought. _Why should you drop the class? Why should you run away?_

She could stick it out. She could be tough about it for a few more weeks. She'd done it once before, right after they'd kissed in his office. She could do it again, if she had to.

_But why should you stay? You don't need it. You don't want it. You couldn't even go into the room. _

She turned her head to look at the email from Professor Blake in the corner of her screen. _We can work something out_, he'd said.

Could they? She thought about her hand on the door that morning, clenched tight around the handle as Raven's word swirled back and forth in her head.

Maybe Raven was right and it was different. Maybe they'd had more time to build up to a quick fuck in a public place, they'd had more time to let Clarke convince herself that it was fine, that there wasn't a problem with her being with her professor or with her professor being with her.

He'd even tried to tell her. He'd pushed her away, he'd pulled back time and time again but she'd opened herself up, she'd offered exactly what he wanted, and she gave it to him.

Maybe it was different.

She didn't think it was different enough.

**To: bellamyb **

**From: clarkegrif **

**Subject: Re: Absence**

Professor Blake,

Thank you for your concern but no sort of arrangements will have to be made. Due to unforeseen conflicts I have had to drop your class. I hope the remaining weeks of the semester go well.

Thank you,

Clarke Griffin

_Three weeks later. _

Bellamy heard footsteps make their way toward his desk. He was just finishing up packing his things—for the last time that semester—when a small hand reached out and rapped on his desk. Glancing up, he smiled at the familiar face and stood up quickly to pull her into a hug.

"O!" he said. "What are you doing here?"

"Well," Octavia dragged out the word. "I just wanted to see how my big brother was faring as super important professor man." She scrunched up her face, teasing him, and then pulled him into another hug.

"It was a pain in the ass finding you though," she said, shoving his shoulder. "This building is huge! Who knew there'd be so many history nerds in the world?"

He slung his bag over his shoulder and stuffed his hands into his pocket, shrugging. He hadn't expected to see Octavia for a few weeks. She'd been planning on staying with her boyfriend and his family until just before Christmas, when she was going to come stay with him. He'd been so busy lately, he'd forgotten to call her when he usually did at the end of the day, he hadn't even known she had changed her plans.

"I thought you were staying with Lincoln after your finals?" he asked.

Octavia turned her face away. "I hadn't heard from you in a while. I missed you," she shrugged. "And when you have called, you've been…distracted. I wanted to check up on you, make sure you were okay."

"Hey," he teased. "Isn't that my job?"

He hadn't meant to worry her, but in truth he was glad she came. The last three weeks of school had been busier than ever, and he'd been holing himself up in his office and his apartment, trying to keep up with grading and lesson plans and everything else so much that he hadn't noticed how lonely he'd actually been. He'd barely even seen his roommate.

"Shut up and buy me lunch," Octavia said. "I didn't have time to grab anything after I got lost in this stupid building."

He let out a laugh as he held the door open for her. "Alright, alright," he said. "There's a café a few minutes off campus, that good enough for you?"

Octavia rolled her eyes. "I've been eating Ramen for a month. That sounds like a damn _feast_."

Octavia was antsy in line.

"What's good here?" she kept asking, squinting at the menu. "The font they used is too damn tiny, I can't read anything."

"I don't know," he said truthfully. "I don't usually come here in afternoons. The ham and cheese croissant is good, though."

"Okay, big brother, I need you to be honest with me right now." Octavia schooled her face into something that he was sure was supposed to look serious to him, and put her hands on his shoulders, turning him to face her. "Exactly how many meals a day do you eat breakfast food?"

He shoved her arms off him. "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If I eat it for all three, then I'm just ahead of the game."

Octavia snorted and went back to squinting at the menu.

The person in front of them moved off to the side, so Bellamy reached for his wallet and rifled through it to find a few bills

"Is the turkey club good?" Octavia asked him as they stepped up to the counter.

"I don't know," he said without looking up. "I told you I don't usually come here—" he stopped abruptly when he looked up and saw who was behind the counter. A familiar face was staring at him, blushing, and then looking away quickly, focusing her eyes on Octavia beside him, instead.

"—in the afternoon," he finished weakly. He felt like needles were prickling his throat. He turned away, coughing twice and then looked back. "Hi, Clarke. I didn't know you worked here."

She nodded without looking at him. "Just on breaks from school," she said. "What can I get for you, Professor?"

Octavia raised an eyebrow at him, looking back and forth between Clarke and himself.

"Professor?" Octavia repeated. "She wasn't in you class."

"I teach more than one class, O," he said. He looked at Clarke and tried to catch her eye. When she looked up, he raised his eyebrows and bit his lip. _Sorry_, he wanted to say. Boy did that encompass a whole lot. _About Raven, and pushing you, about my nosy sister_.

"It's okay," she said, turning back to Octavia. "I was in his class in the beginning of the semester, but I had to drop it a few weeks ago. Taking too many classes, you know how it is." Octavia didn't say anything, just nodded as she watched her brother squirm, playing with the crumpled bills in his hand.

"So," Clarke said. "Ready to order?"

Octavia had been watching him carefully as he ate his sandwich in the corner of the café. She'd been taking slow, deliberate bites, occasionally looking away from him, casting a glance over his shoulder to the counter where Clarke stood. He sat still, munching on his shoulder, content to ignore both of them.

"So," Octavia said, setting her sandwich down. "That's what's up."

Bellamy choked on the bite he'd taken, and had to reach for his water. "What?" he sputtered, once he'd cleared his throat.

"That girl," Octavia nodded toward the counter. "Clarke? That's why you've been so weird."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

He knew Octavia didn't believe him, but she seemed to have given up for the moment, going back to eating her lunch quietly. Bellamy knew it wasn't going to last long—five minutes, tops—but he took a deep breath and relaxed into the silence anyway. When Octavia looked back up only to raise her eyebrow at something happening over his shoulder, he resisted the urge to turn around.

"Why didn't you tell me about her?"

Three minutes. She had only lasted three minutes.

"There's nothing to tell," Bellamy said with a mouth full of turkey club.

"Maybe not now," she countered. "But there probably was three weeks ago."

Bellamy sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. She wasn't going to drop it, and he could either spend her entire visit with her dodging the question, or he could just give it up now, and hope that once she got an explanation she would leave it alone and they'd be able to actually enjoy themselves.

"We were…I don't know. Something. Almost," he said, quietly. "But I freaked out and then I pushed too hard and she misinterpreted things, and now this is where we are." She opened her mouth, to ask him to tell her more, give her an actual explanation he was sure, but he cut her off. "I really don't want to get into it more than that. Not right now. Please."

Octavia's eyes softened, and she nodded.

"Okay," she said. "So. When are we getting a Christmas tree?"

When they'd finished their food, Octavia had piled her plate on top of Bellamy's and pulled him up out of his chair, ignoring his protests about how his pants were too tight and his stomach was too full to move, saying she wanted to wander back down the street toward the music store they had passed on their way to get lunch.

Bellamy stood and grabbed the plates off the table. He looked toward the counter where Clarke had been glancing over at him, but she turned away quickly when she met his eye.

"Hey," he said, grabbing Octavia's elbow, before she ran out. "Why don't you go ahead? I'll bring the plates up and meet you there in a few minutes."

Octavia gave him a knowing smile, and pulled him into a brief hug before stepping out of the café, and turning down the street.

He felt all the blood rush to his face as he brought the plates up, and he had to focus on his feet to make sure he didn't trip over anything. There was only one other customer, and he was sitting in the back reading a book drinking a coffee, so Clarke stood alone at the counter, no doubt waiting for another rush to happen. Bellamy dropped the plates off at the dish return, and stepped over to her.

"Hey," he said after clearing his throat. She looked over at him, startled. "Look, I'm really sorry, I don't normally come here in—"

"The afternoons," she finished for him. "Yeah, I heard." Her voice was flat, emotionless. She wouldn't look him in the eye.

"I just wanted you to know, I didn't come here to seek you out," he said. She scoffed and turned her head away, picking up a mug and a towel, wiping it clean. He was pretty sure he heard her mumble something like, _gee, thanks_, under her breath so he stepped closer to the counter, needing to clarify. "No I just mean—you dropped the class. You wanted…space or whatever. I didn't—I wouldn't have come if I knew you worked here, because I figured you didn't want to see me." He let his hand fall at his side. He watched as she wiped the mug down again and again and again, the towel swirling inside it as she twisted it around and then pulled it out, wiping the outside, and then repeating it twice. He watched, waiting for her to say something, but she didn't, she just stood there, clenching the towel in her fist, avoiding his eye.

He let out a sigh. "I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I won't come in here anymore, if you don't want me to."

He turned on his heel, ignoring the tightness in his chest, and walked toward the door.

"Wait!" she called and he stopped, watching her come out from behind the counter, watched as she reached an arm out to his elbow, her fingers wrapping around his shirt, holding him in place. "You don't…you don't have to do that. You don't have to stay away. If you don't want to."

"No?" he asked, surprised.

She shook her head, and finally met his eye. Her cheeks were still red, and she would glance away every other second, but she was looking at him and she wasn't yelling and her hand was still on his arm. "No."

"Well," he said, trying to push a smile down. "Okay then."

He started going to the café a couple times a week.

She wasn't always there—actually about half the time he was working, but it was okay, because he'd just order his sandwich or his breakfast croissant and coffee, and he'd go to his usual table in the corner and read his book. Just like he did every day.

When she was working, she'd smile and take his order, and he'd ask how she was enjoying the break and she'd say that she wished she had more time for her art, but hey, the bills had to be paid. Then she'd gesture to her apron and he'd smirk and say "I'll leave you to it, then" and take his food and coffee and go into his corner.

It wasn't much. It was barely anything when he thought of where they were a few weeks before. But her smiles stopped looking forced, and he blush started coming only when he smiled at her, and sometimes she'd ask him how he was doing and he'd get to stand at the counter talking to her a minute longer.

She'd catch his eye when he would stand up to put his plate in the dish return and he'd wave to her when he left, and she'd smile and then a few days later he'd be back at the counter, starting it all over again.

He was in the middle of a crossword puzzle when someone slid into the chair across from him. He looked up, surprised to see Clarke, apron and all, looking back at him.

"Hey," he said, not masking his surprise very well.

"I'm on my break," she said, in lieu of a greeting. "Jasper's in the break room trying to get everyone to try his new brownie recipe, so I figured out here would be safer."

He smiled at her. He felt a ridiculous surge of nostalgia, as the image of her sitting across from him in another café, ages ago, flit into his head.

"Did you know that was based on a painting?" she said, nodding at his book.

He shook his head. "No," he said. "I didn't. Which painting?"

Clarke reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. "Hold on," she said. "You have to see it, it's beautiful. The kind of stuff art students dream about."

"So, I'm going to visit my friend Wells for about a week," Clarke said as she handed him a brownie. It was the weekend before Christmas, the café was decked out in all sorts of snowflakes and Santa Claus's and reindeer. "For Christmas."

"Oh," he said. He was surprised. He shouldn't have been surprised. It was the holidays, people visited friends on the holidays. And it was only a week. He knew that he was just a customer and she was just a friend (maybe not. He wasn't sure what she was, but he sure as hell wasn't going to try to explain it) and that he'd see her when she got back, if only across the counter. But somehow her words felt like an ending.

"Well, Merry Christmas," he said quietly, and gave her a smile. She returned it, but her eyebrows were furrowed as she watched him pick up his coffee and move to his usually table.

He ate quickly, not even opening his book, and drank his coffee in a record breakingly low number of sips, before he was putting the mug on the counter and making his way over to the door. He'd just stepped outside when he heard Clarke call his name.

"Bellamy!" she said, coming up behind him. "Just, wait up a sec."

He stopped, and leaned against the side of the café as she wandered around the door, waiting for a few people to filter in before making her way over to him. She stood with her hands wringing in front of her and she was biting her lip as she studied him. He waited for her to say something but before he could get a word out, she'd stepped forward and pressed her hands into his chest. He knew she could feel his heart stuttering, thumping erratically in his chest, but before he found a way to explain she'd leaned forward, pressing her lips into his.

He barely had time to reach a hand out and pull her closer, to slip his fingers from her neck to her hair, when she was pulling back away from him. He would have let go of her, would have stepped away immediately, if he hadn't seen a small smile creep its way onto her face, or if he hadn't felt her hands scrunched up in his shirt.

"There's a hell of a lot of things we need to talk about," she breathed. "But I'm willing to sort through my shit if you're willing to sort through yours."

He nodded, his forehead rubbing up against hers, and he slipped a hand onto her waist, pulling her closer. He felt a small laugh bubble out of her and skitter across his skin.

"You got it," he said softly. He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. "Just, before we do that…"

He felt her chest shake against his as his lips pressed into her smile as he pulled her back into him.

"So," he said, pulling away. "We're good."

She reached a hand up, brushing his hair out of his eyes. Her lip was between her teeth, biting down a smile. "We're getting there."


End file.
